[BOAI] UK government position paper on open access

[Peter Suber]

[I'm forwarding the summary of a roundtable discussion on March 17, 2011,
convened by David Willetts, the UK Minister of State for Universities and
Science.  In attendance were the heads of most of the Research Councils,
JISC, RIN, the head of HEFCE, several publishers, learned societies,
research charities, academics and consultants (disclosure:  including myself
by video link).  The summary was prepared by the Research Councils Unit,
Department for Business, Innovation & Skills.  --Peter Suber.]


*Transparency Roundtable - Key Points*

The Coalition [coalition government of the UK] has a commitment to Open
Access (taken here to mean increased transparency to facilitate improved
access to research publications and data).

The Roundtable appeared to recognise that OA has the potential to bring
significant benefits to the academic community and through its effective
translation, the wider economy and society. What is also clear is that
whilst a trend towards OA is developing, how we move from “here to there”
remains a major challenge. The transition needs to be achieved without
losing the advantages of the current arrangements (such as academic Peer
Review in co- operation with publishers).

New funding models are emerging but they also present the challenge of
determining which is preferable. ‘Green’ and ‘gold’ are clearly different
and whilst ‘gold’[1] may be more appealing, it is not clear, from an OA
perspective, that it provides the best solution or is sustainable. We need
to consider where costs should fall.

More policy development work will be needed (including some cost benefit
analysis of the possible options). The Royal Society/Learned
Societies/RCUK/HEFCE/publishers may all have something to contribute towards
arriving at a sustainable solution. Learned Societies can act as a ‘bridge’
between academia and the publishing sector.

We will want to consider how we can best use the means to bring about change
(including the REF, negotiations on improving the relevant EU directive and
policy developments and proposals for the forthcoming White Paper on Higher
Education) to push the issue forward in a collaborative way.

*Detail*

Access to the results of research should be a core principle. In this and
other important respects (including the drive towards increased transparency
and the greater use of repositories) approaches being adopted by Harvard and
the UK Research Councils are similar.

• Experience at Harvard (and MIT) indicates that when given the opportunity
to adopt an Open Access (OA) approach increasing numbers of academics would
prefer to do so.

 • There are possible savings to education (although total public sector
cost is likely to be a ‘zero-sum’ game) and recognised benefits to SMEs
experiencing difficulties in accessing data from universities (the
opportunity cost due to lost innovation by SMEs has been estimated in one
study to be £4m/firm). In the US the Committee for Economic Development has
endorsed OA

• UK Research Councils (RCs) have policies on OA and have adopted the same
approach to ‘green’ OA[2] , with embargo periods in the range of six to
twelve months. Examples of good practice include the Economic and Social
Research Councils (ESRC’s) ‘Research catalogue’ repository and BBSRC/MRC/
Wellcome Trust’s UKPubMed in the life sciences.

• Future development in the UK (and elsewhere) will include the use of
appropriate search engines to help users to ‘mine’ the required information
from repositories and other OA sources to help users to cope with the
growing volume of publications at their disposal[3]. This will also help in
monitoring compliance – a key issue.

• The Higher Education Funding Council England (HEFCE) will be determining
how increased

transparency and ‘green’ OA should feature for evaluation within the
Research Excellence Framework (REF). It is recognised that criteria should
be sensitive to the nature of the research, since ‘one size may not fit
all’, such as the length of embargo periods in different disciplines before
material is required to be published through repositories, and different
publishing traditions such as primary use of monographs rather than journal.

• It was acknowledged that the RCs are important as funders but that the
greatest impact on promoting OA might be derived from Universities requiring
OA. The REF may be the right mechanism for encouraging universities towards
this approach. In addition in the arts and humanities sector the Arts and
Humanities Research Council is a minority funder, others such as HEFCE have
more influence.

• The UK is already experiencing some success with OA as evidenced by the
Welcome Trust’s 50 per cent compliance rate for its PubMed Central site and
its requirement for research outputs to be published within six months. If
all papers went to OA, the cost to WT would be an estimated £10 million or
1.25 per cent of its research budget.

• Although there has been commitment to the ‘green’ model there was some
doubt as to how well this is being maintained in practice and concern about
continuing difficulties for smaller universities and colleges being able to
afford access. There was also some question as to how effectively the
‘green’ model adequately compensated the publisher compared to ‘gold’.

• Need to work with the publishing industry so that the value added service
it provides (which includes administration of peer review, quality control
of presentation and an assurance of credibility and due recognition)
continues to form part of a scaleable and sustainable business model without
placing an unacceptable OA cost burden on the author/funder.

• The prime benefit of OA should not be seen to be the reduction of
publishing costs (which may be possible through more efficient processes)
but instead, the wider benefit to the UK (and global) economy resulting from
increased communication and translation of knowledge.

• For research undertaken in the public interest it would be reasonable to
assume that an element of the research funding should be for OA publication.
The cost to researchers / funding agencies could, under some approaches, be
prohibitive. It is not clear that, in the taxpayers’ interests, there has
been sufficient negotiation between parties to their mutual advantage. The
UK Research Council funding mechanisms through Full Economic Costing does
provide the means to fund OA.

• We face a period of transition in which it will be necessary to avoid
cannibalising or de- stabilising the current system (including Peer Review)
during which the greatest rate of progress is likely to be achieved through
collaboration.

• Need to consider the global picture. In the US research from publicly
employed researchers is published and the Federal Government is understood
to be broadly supportive. China has experienced significant growth in
publications; chemistry alone has increased five fold since 1996. China now
produces 50 per cent of the world’s papers in chemistry, but Chinese authors
may not be able/or prepared to pay for ‘gold’ access, although it was
pointed out that Hong Kong has an OA policy. In Australia a university with
an OA mandate had noticed that its funding from industry was increasing at
twice the national rate, which it had concluded was largely attributable to
60-70 per cent of its research output being OA and therefore more
accessible.

• Data is an important and potentially an even more challenging area for OA
than publications. The Royal Society is about to establish a group to look
at openness and data sharing with regard to the Freedom of Information Act
(which requires disclosure). Consideration is also being given, by the
Ministry of Justice, to the Data Protection Directive which relates
to personal data. ONS stated that under the Statistics and Regulation of
Services Act that there is a presumption of release for data. RCUK has
recently adopted principles for access to research data.

• The issue of OA becomes one of how best to manage the transition from
where we are now to an OA world in a sustainable way, but, even the present
arrangements are not sustainable. It is not clear which model to adopt. The
reader pays model is a problem in terms of not having free access, but the
author pays (‘gold’) approach may be more expensive overall for the UK and
not pursued internationally.

*RCU/RB *
*25 March 2011*
*
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1.  The gold route is a business model whereby the author or her funder pays
the publisher to make the article freely available through their journal on
open access immediately on publication. Many publishers now operate this
business model for new journals, which is of course dependent on research
authors being adequately funded by their research grants to cover this
up-front cost. This is more problematical on the humanities side than on the
science and medical side, as a smaller proportion of such research is
Research Council funded, where such costs can be claimed. Many more
publishers operate what has become known as a ‘hybrid model’ whereby some
articles are available immediately on open access if the author is able to
fund the publication fee. If not , the article is published alongside the
rest of the journal that is made available on subscription. The subscription
price of the journal is adjusted in proportion to the number of open access
articles in the mix. This model is likely to gain ground rapidly as funding
agencies require that researchers funded by their grants should publish on
open access.

2.  The green route involves posting a version of the article in a
repository, managed on a subject basis by such as the Wellcome Trust or on
an institutional basis by such as the University of Southampton. Many
publishers permit through their contract for publication research authors to
post a version of the peer-reviewed manuscript in a repository, usually with
a time delay (a so-called ‘embargo’) so as not to undermine the ‘time’ value
of the subscription journal. This model is being further discussed within
the publisher community and may be applied more systematically in the
future, based around embargos applied by subject or even by journal in line
with the half life of access to the subscription journal. In other words,
the access cost will be discounted over time, but on a variable basis. The
PEER project, now in its third year and funded by the European Commission,
is an observatory designed to test the dynamics of access via repositories,
and the impact on the existing system.

3.  The annual growth rate is about five per cent, on a baseline of over one
million publications per year, meaning that some assisted searching for
publications is necessary.  Fortunately, the cost of storage is falling.
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